Using hosts file to develop site on new hosting not working

can't get hosts file in WinXP to work correctly

lissie45

I have a site which I am redeveloping for client. I want to redevelop the site on my reseller hosting - get approval and then chnage the nameservers permanetly

In the meantime I was going to change the hosts file on my laptop to reflect the new IP of my hosting for the site

I've done this by adding a line like 12.23.455.87 mysite.com www.mysite.com

I can ping mysite.com and it returns the (new) IP address

I have restared browser, cleared caches, stoped DNS services running on the laptop, rebooted the laptop

I've run ipconfig/flushdns several times

but nothing will give me anything but a time out error (on IE) or a blank page (with FF)

I have rebooted my cable modem in case there was an issue with DNS caching there

I can see the site on the new hosting if I browse to 12.34.567.89/~user ( hosting is hostgator reseller if it matters)

theres no typo in the hosts file - there are no extra copies of hosts lying around - Im using the one is windoes/system32/drivers/etc

There are only 2 lines in the file 127.0.0.0 localhost

and my extra line

I've wasted hours on this - I really can't see the issue - hoping someone else can

lammert

11:18 am on Mar 17, 2010 (gmt 0)

First of all welcome to WebmasterWorld lissie45!

There are two things I can think of. One problem might be that somewhere between your laptop and the server a proxy is intercepting your request and passing it along to another IP address than you think. This may be caused by proxy settings in your browser, but some ISPs and corporate networks have a transparent proxy in place which catches all requests to port 80 on the fly.

A second possibility might be that at your hosting company the webserver isn't setup yet to receive connections for the domain mysite.com. That you can access your site via 12.34.56.78/~user is an indication that space has been made available to you to store your script files etc, but to direct requests for mysite.com and www.mysite.com your hosting company has to make an entry in their server configuration which tells them that the files for mysite.com can be found in that project directory.

lissie45

7:04 pm on Mar 17, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks Lammert for the reply - I posted this and went to bed in disgust - this monring its working *sigh* ! Last thing I did was change the nameservers over for the domain - and I suppose that may have propgaged in less than 8 hours ....

I am thinking that maybe my new ISP is using a proxy. I don't think it was the hosting company as I've set up many sites there and never seen an issue like it on the web (nor seen something similar reported)

Thanks for the welcome!

g1smd

8:46 am on Mar 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

I have seen it take three days for a name to resolve on several occasions in the past. Always on a job that was time critical too.